Report: Kyrgyzstan under massive DOS attack

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Last week IWMP received a phone call from a colleague in Central Asia.
Apparently, Kyrgyzstan is under a massive denial of service attack.
Three of four ISPs have been taken down, and their upstream providers
in Russia, and Kazakhstan are refusing to pass traffic because of the
scale of the attacks. At this stage, the motivation appears to be
political, and follows several political/mass media websites which
have been blocked in the past two weeks by Kyrgyz authorities. The
suspicion is that the current DOS attacks are commercial --
commissioned and similar to those we reported back in 2005.

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The US has an airbase in Kyrgystan that it’s been using for operations in Afghanistan. Last week the government announced that it was going to close the base because of pressure from Russia. The US said it would give Kyrgystan a bunch of money to keep it open.

here’s a thought; the world knows the CIA is armpit deep in cocaine trade (eg: the three tonnes they dropped out the Mexican sky with), how important is heroin to the CIA? Kyrgystan is an opium corridor, the big push into Afghanistan will guarantee a big push of opium out, who’s making the money here?

I also see Kyrgystan come up in listings of CIA secret torture gulag “black sites”. Not really a problem for them though I suppose, just load up the one or two actual value “subjects” and quietly kill the rest. All you’d need was a Cessna.

Kyrgyzstan is the only nation to have both a U.S. AND a Russian military base within it’s borders. It’s an insignificant country on the global stage but a player on the ‘Stanscape and strategically well-located, what with being a short flight from Afghanistan, sharing a border with China, etc.

In theory, it’s Russian hackers, gov’t commissioned. It’s about oil and as a side to that the US base plays into it, but not as the primary. Basic strategy: make a mess of the communications there so no one wants to route business/$ data through. Russia offers to play cleanup; Russia legally moves in their people to “fix” it and never moves them out.

The issue here is you have four ISPs. Four. With relative limited usage country-wide. This is a DoS attack too, which is inarguably effective, but not exactly sophisticated. That happens in the US or EU, it gets fixed in hours. It’s annoying, but it gets fixed with some degree of speed. Over there, it’s a more serious issue due to vulnerability of data and lack of ISPs.

Of course, we’re only getting wire reports on this–like Takuan, I agree actual ground intel would be more helpful. It’s worth watching if only to see if the US steps in to assist (which they should, if only to learn from).

Interestingly, about 8 years ago, the company that I was working for was hit hard by a bunch of spammers and viruses originating in Kyrgyzstan.
It was a pain in the ass for a couple of weeks.
What goes around….

Reminds me of the similar nature of the cyber attacks on Estonia, something that was of notable interest to cyber guru’s specializing in security was dismissed as “an unimportant example” by the vice directors at the Institute of Information Security Issues at Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Wonder what the scale of this one will be once cyber smoke has clared.